Fact: North Carolina has no indigenous fossil fuels.

Fact: North Carolina is the 8th largest consumer of electricity in the United States.

Fact: 54% of our electricity is derived from burning coal.

Fact: North Carolina sends $10.1 billion dollars out of state every year buying fossil fuels for power generation.

Plasma, the "4th state of matter" (no, we are not talking about blood), is the dominant form of matter in the universe. As material is heated from solid, to liquid, to gas phase, and then even hotter, it begins to become ionized .... that is, one or more of the electrons on an atom become liberated. A plasma can be  described as a collection of ionized particles, which interact collectively by long-range electromagnetic forces associated with their charges and motion. When the inter-particle binding energy is small compared to the average kinetic energy of the particles, then a plasma exhibits its most complex collective behaviors. 

Fortunately for human beings and other living things, plasmas are not routinely encountered on the surface of the Earth. However, we do see natural plasmas in the form of lightning and auroras, and man-made ones most commonly in the form of fluorescent light bulbs.

Plasmas occur in nature when matter exceeds temperatures of roughly 10,000¡C. At these temperatures, the constituent atoms and molecules of matter begin to lose their bound electrons to form a substance composed of positive or negative ions and free electrons. All principal phenomena in plasmas can be traced to the fact that ions and electrons interact with each other through long-range electromagnetic forces. The electromagnetic interactions of groups of charged particles are often coherent, leading to collective modes of plasma behavior. This collective interaction of charged particles, a many-body problem, is the essence of the field of plasma physics. Roughly 99% of the matter in the universe is in a plasma state. This is Bilboa Energy.

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